Make Your Blog Work for You
Life has been hectic the last few weeks for myself. I have been getting many requests for work with my business and to top it off we have taken a small family trip to visit relatives. Rhett also has been very business with work, looking for a house, and partying it up in Las Vegas. When things get busy like this it can be hard to find time to sit down and write a post on your blog. Fortunately you don’t have to write on your blog and always be at your blog. With the magic of scheduling posts you can write your posts in advance and have them published at a future date and time.
WordPress users have had this great feature for a long time now. It was one of several reasons I switched my Webmaster blog from Blogger to a self hosted WordPress blog. I love the ability to write several posts on advance and schedule them for different days during the week. If you have a full time job and blog as a hobby scheduling posts can make it appear that you have been busy writing posts all week long.
Blogger.com bloggers have longed for the ability to schedule posts and it was one of the features I really wanted to see in Blogger. Way back in February Blogger in Draft started to allow Blogger.com bloggers to schedule posts to publish at future dates. If you use Blogger.com to publish your blog you can access Blogger in Draft by going to http://draft.blogger.com/ to access the new features before they are moved over to the regular Blogger. I was really looking forward to using scheduled posts on Blogger, but none of my blogs are published to blogspot blogs, but are FTP published blogs. It appears that scheduled posts don’t work for FTP published blogs yet. I tried it on several posts and while Blogger in Draft would say the posts were published they were not available on my FTP published blog, but returned 404 errors. Nothing like getting my hopes up Google and then crushing them.
You can probably guess the reason I am writing this post is because both Rhett and I have not been very good at writing ahead and scheduling posts. This has been a mistake on our part. We strive to post three days a week and have been unable to keep that posting schedule a few times now. We have failed to make our blog work for us and most importantly we have failed the most important people in this, you the readers. How can we inspire you to be better bloggers when we ourselves cannot publish regularly. This is a case where you can hopefully learn from our mistake and you can make better use of scheduled posts on your blog.
If you are wondering, this post is scheduled but I wrote it while on my trip. I won’t let that happen again, I hope.